For years I had a stated opinion, one I said out loud often enough that people probably got tired of hearing it, that solo modes bolted onto multiplayer games were basically marketing, a box quote, a line on the back cover that maybe three people out of a hundred owners ever actually used. Games are social. That’s the whole appeal, the table, the arguing, the teaching. Playing one alone felt to me like going to a restaurant and eating standing up at the counter, technically the same food, missing the entire point.
Then Dev had a two week work trip last spring, and Pri was dealing with a sick kid, and my Friday group just quietly didn’t happen for three straight weeks, and I got restless enough that I actually cracked open the solo variant in the Dwellings of Eldervale rulebook, the one I’d owned for months and specifically bought for the multiplayer experience. I figured I’d get through one round out of curiosity and set it back down.
I played four sessions that week. The AI opponent, or “Ghost” as the game calls it, runs off a simple deck-flip system that somehow produces a genuinely different texture of decision every time, no negotiation, no reading anyone’s face across the table, just me against a set of rules that don’t care whether I’m having a good time, which turned out to be exactly what I needed some evenings. There’s a specific quiet to it. No explaining a rule to someone new, no waiting for another player to finish a long turn, just my own pace, and I found myself actually thinking harder about the engine building because there was nobody to bounce ideas off of, just the tableau and me.
I’ve since gone back and tried solo modes in three other games I own that I’d previously dismissed the same way, and two of them are genuinely good, thoughtfully built systems rather than an afterthought stapled on to satisfy a Kickstarter stretch goal. One was bad, to be fair, clearly an afterthought, so I’m not saying every solo mode deserves the benefit of the doubt. But I was wrong about the category as a whole, and wrong in a pretty smug way for a long time about it too. Some games are worse alone. Some are just different alone, and different isn’t automatically worse, it just took me until my Friday table went quiet for three weeks running to actually find that out for myself instead of assuming I already knew the answer.